Adobe lays out the future for Flash: a platform for the next 5-10 years

Out of fashion though it may be, Adobe isn't planning to abandon its Flash …

Adobe has published its roadmap for its Flash browser plugin and its AIR desktop application counterpart. More releases, more features, and more performance, are all planned, but on fewer platforms: Adobe is giving up entirely on supporting smartphone browsers, sticking to the core desktop platforms for its plugin—and with a big question mark when it comes to Windows 8.

The company sees Flash as having two main markets that will resist the onslaught of HTML5: game development, and premium (read: encrypted) video. To that end, the features it has planned for future updates focus on making Flash faster, with greater hardware acceleration and improved script performance, and more application-like, with keyboard input in full-screen applications, and support for middle- and right-mouse buttons.

Three releases are planned this year. Version 11.2, due this quarter, will incorporate the mouse improvements, greater hardware acceleration, and multithreaded video decoding. Following that in the second quarter is codename "Cyril," with the keyboard changes, low-latency audio, and richer 3D support. In the second half of 2012, Adobe will release "Dolores," which will introduce support for multithreaded applications, using a model similar to HTML5's Web Workers.

Looking further ahead, with version "Next," the company wishes to make Flash a platform that meets developers' needs "over the next five to 10 years." Central to this will be substantial work to improve the ActionScript programming language used to develop Flash applications. Adobe intends to add support for strictly-enforced static typing, so that a greater range of coding errors are detected as soon as developers make them, and to enable greater performance optimization (a similar strategy to the one Google is using for its Dart programming language).

Though Adobe envisages a long future ahead for Flash and AIR, the platform is nonetheless being scaled back. Flash on Android is essentially dead, with the company's decision not to support Flash in Chrome for Android. With the plugin never even an option on iOS, this means that the two biggest smartphone and tablet platforms are Flash-free, and will remain that way forever.

However, both these platforms support the development of standalone applications using the AIR runtime.

Less clear is the situation for Windows 8, with Adobe saying only that it is "working closely with Microsoft to finalize details around supported configurations for Flash Player and Adobe AIR on Windows 8." While Microsoft has said that its Metro-style, touch version of Internet Explorer will not support plugins, the desktop version of the browser will retain that capability—at least on x86 and x64 systems. ARM machines will have to forgo Flash entirely.

The possibility exists that Microsoft will bless the creation of Metro-style touch applications built using the AIR runtime.

This leaves Adobe with Flash on the desktop, and embedded into smart TV systems. Even on the desktop, there is to be some scaling back of Flash's breadth and availability.

Currently, the plugin is available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Windows and Mac OS X will continue to be supported as they currently are. Linux, however, will see a change. Version 11.2 will be the last standalone version of Flash released for that operating system (though Adobe will make security updates for a further five years). Subsequent versions will be bundled into Chrome, using Google's proprietary "Pepper" API, instead of the venerable NPAPI currently used.

Scaled back as Adobe's plans may be, the platform isn't going away, and the company clearly has an eye on the future. The Flash browser plugin may well find itself getting squeezed out by a combination of HTML5 and "there's an app for that," but the AIR runtime could continue to be a valuable tool in developers' arsenals.